WordPress makes it really easy to create a photo blog or run an online portfolio of your images. As such, many photographers, both professionals, and hobbyists alike, tend to use WordPress to showcase their works online. Of course, you still need to cater to popular photo-centric platforms, such as Flickr or 500px, but having your own website with a showcase of your images goes a long way in establishing your identity online. If you are looking to create a photography website using WordPress, where should you begin? You can, obviously, use WordPress plugins to do more with your website. This article […]
A WordPress Developers Guide To Type Hinting In PHP 5 And 7
PHP started out as a simple language without a lot of the conventions of other C-like programming languages that make them challenging to learn and more difficult to write. Over time, as PHP matured, many of those features have been added as optional syntax. One example of this type of feature is type hinting. Type hinting gives you the ability to define the type of values that can be passed for each argument of a function or method. Type hinting is optional, but when used it forces parameters to be a certain type or an error is thrown. Doing so makes […]
Building a WordPress Plugin Part 3: Setting Up a Custom Content Type
In the second part of our series, we got ourselves off to a structured start by using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate to erect some sensible scaffolding around our future code. By taking this approach, we were able to kick things off with a substantial amount of best plugin practices baked in for free. This time around, we’ll look at giving some of our future user-created content a home of its own in the back end by using a custom post type. This will give us an opportunity to take some baby steps in actually using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate itself, and […]
Is Your Site Translation-Ready? Here’s How to Tell
Pop quiz: Out of the ten countries that search most often for “WordPress themes,” what’s the highest rank achieved by an English-speaking country? We’ll just tell you: it’s the United States, and it comes in 9th. In fact, the English-language version doesn’t even make up half of all WordPress core-file downloads. Of course, these facts shouldn’t be terribly surprising, since English is far from the most commonly-spoken language in the world. It’s third, behind Mandarin and Spanish. One reason why WordPress is so popular all around the globe is its availability in so many different languages. In 2014, the number […]
Building a WordPress Plugin Part 2: Getting Off To A Solid Start
In the first part of our series on building a plugin, we kicked things off with some general background information on plugins, then cobbled together a very basic Hello World example to prove that creating a functioning plugin of some sort is within everyone’s grasp. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that our initial approach to making a plugin was a little on the slapdash side. We simply wanted to see something on the screen, and weren’t too concerned about what was happening behind the scenes. This time around we’ll get a bit more organized, employing a handy piece of kit called […]
How To Customize The WordPress Login Page
Even after working with WordPress for a long while, many people are still surprised to learn that the backend of their website is just as customizable as the front and that none of the things they take for granted are really set in stone. We ‘ve covered this a bit in how to customize the WordPress dashboard and customizing the WordPress editor. Today we want to continue with this theme by turning to another internal page users interact with on a daily basis — the login page. Just like other parts of WordPress, we can completely customize the login page. First, we […]
Product Launch UX Best Practices Part 5: Building a WP Welcome Page Boilerplate
Welcome to Part five in my series on User Experience (UX) best practices in a product launch. In the previous article, I talked about the importance of including a welcome page in your plugin. Today I’ll explain how to build that welcome page with a GPL licensed boilerplate that can be used on any WordPress product. Welcome Page Boilerplate For Your WordPress Product I created a WP Welcome Page Boilerplate to simplify the process of adding a welcome page. The boilerplate is currently available as a WordPress plugin. You can download the latest release version here and install it on your WordPress […]
WordPress In Action: Wharton Business School
Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most prestigious business schools in the world, launched Knowledge@Wharton, an online business analysis publication in 1999. The site covers everything from business trends to industry news. In collaboration with web development agency WebDevStudios, Knowledge@Wharton received an overhaul in December 2015. As part of the redesign, the WDS team migrated Knowledge@Wharton’s several subsites to one multisite network, which includes a global edition of the publication in English and regional editions in Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. “They were already using WordPress,” CTO and Co-Founder of WDS Brian Messenlehner told Torque. “We built them a […]
Should You Use Object Interfaces For WordPress Development?
Lately, I’ve written extensively about object-oriented PHP, from class inheritance and visibility, to design patterns and magic methods. In all of these discussions, I’ve talked about classes without taking into account object interfaces. Interfaces, often referred to as contracts or agreements, set up rules for classes in which a class that implements an interface has to follow those specific rules. Interfaces put constraints on your classes that improve your code. In this article, I’m going to discuss what interfaces are and what they can and can’t do. By the end, you will be able to see if you should use interfaces to improve your code. […]
Building A WordPress Plugin: First Steps And Setting the Scene
Plugins have played such a crucial role in driving WordPress’ continuous success over the years that it’s impossible to imagine the platform without them. However, while we’ve all probably popped the hood of a theme in order to make a few stylistic tweaks at some stage, the inner workings of plugins are still a mystery for many WordPress users. There remains a slight sense of uncertainty and unease among non-technical users about what exactly is going on behind the scenes. That’s a situation we’re setting out to shed some light on in our six-part guide to building a WordPress plugin from […]
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